Cracking India

by Bapsi Sidhwa

  Ice-candy-man studies us, moving his swaggering eyes triumphantly from face to face.

  Ayah, the Government House gardener, Hari and Moti stare back with set, expressionless faces. Masseur frowns. Yousaf scowls at the naked veranda bulb. Imam Din gets up, leaning heavily on the Government House gardener, and invoking Allah’s mercy and blessings and sighing, heads for the kitchen.

  “Show me your hand,” says Ice-candy-man to Ayah.

  Ayah, surprised into thinking he wants to read her future, opens her plump palm and shows it to Ice-candy-man. I also think he is initiating seduction through palmistry. Instead he places a gold coin in her hand. Ayah studies it minutely and bites it to test the gold.

  It is bitten and passed from hand to hand and on to me. I examine Queen Victoria’s embossed profile with fascination. Despite the difference in the metals it is the same profile she displays in her statue.

  Ayah returns the coin to Ice-candy-man.

  “Keep it. It’s for you,” he says grandly, folding her fingers over it.

  “No,” she says, shaking her head and hiding her hands behind her back.

  She’s like me. There are some things she will not hold.

  “But I brought it specially for you! Please accept it,” pleads Ice-candy-man, for the first time sounding like his old ingratiating self.

  Ayah averts her face. “Where’s Sher Singh?” she suddenly asks. As if the zoo attendant is somewhere he ought not to be.

  There is no reply.

  “He’s left Lahore, I think,” says Yousaf at last, glancing at Ice-candy-man.

  Ice-candy-man makes a harsh, crude sound. “There’s natural justice for you!” he says, spitting the red juice into the ferns again. “You remember how he got rid of his Muslim tenants? Well, the tenants had their own back! Exposed themselves to his womenfolk! They went a bit further... played with one of Sher Singh’s sisters... Nothing serious-but her husband turned ugly... He was killed in the scuffle,” says Ice-candy-man casually. “Well, they had to leave Lahore sooner or later... After what one hears of Sikh atrocities it’s better they left sooner! The refugees are clamoring for revenge!”

  “Were you among the men who exposed themselves?” asks the Government House gardener. His tone implies more a mild assertion than a question.

  “What’s it to you, oye?” says Ice-candy-man, raising his voice and flaring into an insolent display of wrath. “If you must know, I was! I’ll tell you to your face—I lose my senses when I think of the mutilated bodies on that train from Gurdaspur... that night I went mad, I tell you! I lobbed grenades through the windows of Hindus and Sikhs I’d known all my life! I hated their guts ... I want to kill someone for each of the breasts they cut off the Muslim women ... The penises!”

  In the silence that follows, the gardener clears his throat. “You’re right, brother,” he says. I feel he cannot meet Ice-candy-man’s eyes. He is looking so deliberately at the floor that it appears as if he is hanging his head. “There are some things a man cannot look upon without going mad. It’s the mischief of Satan ... Evil will spawn evil ... God preserve us.” His voice is gruff with the burden of disillusion and loss. “I’ve sent my family to Delhi. As soon as the Sarkar permits I will join them.” The gardener turns his weary gaze upon Hari. “Have you made plans to go, brother?” he asks.

  “Where to?” says Hari, shaking his head and wiping his eyes with his arm. “I’ll ride the storm out. I’ve nowhere to go.”

  “You’ll find someplace to go,” says the Government House gardener. “When our friends confess they want to kill us, we have to go... ” He makes no move to wipe the tears running in little rills through his gray stubble and dripping from his chin. The red rims of his eyes are blurred and soggy and blend into the soft flesh as if he has become addicted to weeping.

  Moti and Papoo are sitting bowed and subdued on the veranda steps. “What about you two?” Masseur asks. “Are you leaving?”

  After a pause, during which we hear Moti’s knuckles crack as he presses his fingers against his palm, speaking hesitantly and so low that I can barely hear him, he says, “I talked to the padre at the Cantonment Mission ... We’re becoming Christian.”

  Ice-candy-man, appearing restless, nods casually. “Quite a few of your people are converting,” he says. “You’d better change your name, too, while you’re at it.”

  The longer I observe Ice-candy-man the more I notice the change wrought in him. He seems to have lost his lithe, catlike movements. And he appears to have put on weight. Perhaps it’s just the air of consequence on him that makes him appear more substantial.

  “The Faletti’s Hotel cook has also run away with his tail between his legs!” he informs us, unasked. And once again he appears bloated with triumph ... and a horrid irrepressible gloating.

  It is very late. The frogs are croaking again. We might have some rain yet. Except for Masseur, everyone has gone. We move to the patch of grass near the servants’ quarters. There is a full moon out but it is pitch dark where we sit under a mulberry tree. There is no breeze. And except for the occasional rustle in the leaves caused by a restless bird, or the indiscernible movement of a frog, the night is still.

  Ayah is crying softly. “I must get out of here,” she says, sniffing and wiping her nose on her sari-blouse sleeve. “I have relatives in Amritsar I can go to.”

  “You don’t need to go anywhere,” says Masseur, so assuredly possessive that I feel a stab of jealousy. “Why do you worry? I’m here. No one will touch a hair on your head. I don’t know why you don’t marry me!” he says, sighing persuasively. “You know I worship you... ”

  “I’m already yours,” says Ayah with disturbing submission. “I will always be yours.”

  “Don’t you dare marry him!” I cry. “You’ll leave me ... Don’t leave me,” I beg, kicking Masseur.

  “Silly girl! I won’t leave you ... And if I have to, you’ll find another ayah who will love you just as much.”

  “I don’t want another ayah ... I will never let another ayah touch me!”

  I start sobbing. I kiss Ayah wherever Masseur is not touching her in the dark.

  Chapter 20

  Rosy-Peter have gone. The Government House gardener has gone...

  And the gramophones and speakers mounted on tongas and lorries scratchily, endlessly pouring out the melody of Nur Jehan’s popular film song that is now so strangely apt:Mere bachpan ke sathi mujhe bhool na jana-

  Dekho, dekho hense na zamana, hanse na zamana.

  Friends from our childhood, don’t forget us—

  See that a changed world does not mock us.

  Instead, wave upon scruffy wave of Muslim refugees flood Lahore—and the Punjab west of Lahore. Within three months seven million Muslims and five million Hindus and Sikhs are uprooted in the largest and most terrible exchange of population known to history. The Punjab has been divided by the icy card-sharks dealing out the land village by village, city by city, wheeling and dealing and doling out favors.

  For now the tide is turned—and the Hindus are being favored over the Muslims by the remnants of the Raj. Now that its objective to divide India is achieved, the British favor Nehru over Jinnah. Nehru is Kashmiri; they grant him Kashmir. Spurning logic, defying rationale, ignoring the consequence of bequeathing a Muslim state to the Hindus, while Jinnah futilely protests: “Statesmen cannot eat their words!”

  Statesmen do.

  They grant Nehru Gurdaspur and Pathankot, without which Muslim Kashmir cannot be secured.

  Nehru wears red carnations in the buttonholes of his ivory jackets. He bandies words with Lady Mountbatten and is presumed to be her lover. He is charming, too, to Lord Mountbatten. Suave, Cambridge-polished, he carries about him an aura of power and a presence that flatters anyone he compliments tenfold. He doles out promises, smiles, kisses-on-cheeks. He is in the prime of his Brahmin manhood. He is handsome: his cheeks glow pink.

  Jinnah is incapable of compliments. Austere, driven, pukka-sahib accented
, deathly ill: incapable of cheek-kissing. Instead of carnations he wears a karakuli cap, somber with tight, gray lamb’s-wool curls: and instead of pale jackets, black achkan coats. He is past the prime of his elegant manhood. Sallow, whip-thin, sharp-tongued, uncompromising. His training at the Old Bailey and practice in English courtrooms has given him faith in constitutional means, and he puts his misplaced hopes into tall standards of upright justice. The fading Empire sacrifices his cause to their shifting allegiances.

  Mother shows me a photograph: “She is Jinnah’s wife,” she says. “She’s Parsee.”

  The woman in the photograph is astonishingly beautiful. Large eyes, liquid-brown, radiating youth, promising intelligence, declaring innocence, shining from an oval marble-firm face. Full-lipped, delighting in the knowledge of her own loveliness: confident in the knowledge of her generous impulses. Giving—like Ayah. Daring—like Mother. “Plucky!” Mother says.

  For the lady in the photograph is daring: an Indian woman baring her handsome shoulders in a strapless gown in an era when such unclothing was considered reprehensible. Defying, at eighteen, her wealthy knighted father, braving the disapproval of their rigid community, excommunicated, she marries a Muslim lawyer twenty-two years older than her. Jinnah was brilliant, elegantly handsome: he had to be to marry such a raving beauty. And cold, too, he had to be—to win such a generous heart.

  “Where is she?” I ask Mother.

  Mother’s eyes turn inwards. Her lips give a twitch: “She died at twenty-nine. Her heart was broken... ”

  Her daring to no account. Her defiance humbled. Her energy extinguished. Only her image in the photograph and her innocence—remain intact.

  But didn’t Jinnah, too, die of a broken heart? And today, forty years later, in films of Gandhi’s and Mountbatten’s lives, in books by British and Indian scholars, Jinnah, who for a decade was known as “Ambassador of Hindu-Muslim Unity,” is caricatured, and portrayed as a monster. The man about whom India’s poetess Naidu Sarojini wrote:... the calm hauteur of his accustomed reserve masks, for those who know him, a naive and eager humanity, an intuition quick and tender as a woman’s, a humor gay and winning as a child’s—pre—eminently rational and practical, discreet and dispassionate in his estimate and acceptance of life, the obvious sanity and serenity of his worldly wisdom effectually disguise a shy and splendid idealism which is of the very essence of the man.

  Chapter 21

  Hari has had his bodhi shaved. He has become a Muslim.

  He has also had his penis circumcised. “By a barber,” says Cousin, unbuttoning his fly in Electric-aunt’s sitting room. Treating me to a view of his uncircumcised penis, he stretches his foreskin back to show me how Hari’s circumcised penis must look.

  I recall Hari’s dark genitals, partially obscured by the dust and dusk and crumpled with fear as he stood in the circle of his tormentors. My imagination presents unbearable images. I shake my head to dispel them and revert my attention to Cousin’s exposed flesh.

  His genitals have grown since I last examined them three years ago—after he’d had his hernia operation. The penis is longer and thicker and gracefully arched—and it seems to be breathing.

  “Feel it,” offers Cousin.

  I like its feel. It is warm and cuddly. As I squeeze the pliant flesh it strengthens and grows in my hand.

  “Hey!” I say. “What’s this!”

  Cousin has a funny look in his eyes that I don’t trust.

  “I have become a honeycomb,” he says. “Lick me, here, and see what happens.”

  I lick the tip gingerly. Nothing. No honey.

  “You’ve got to suck out the honey.” Cousin arches his back and maneuvers his penis to my mouth.

  “Suck it yourself!” I say, standing up.

  “I can’t,” says Cousin.

  I see the absurdity of my suggestion. I shrug away.

  I like Cousin. I’ve even thought of marrying him when we grow up, but this is a side of him I’m becoming aware of for the first time, and I don’t like it.

  “All right, I’ll show you anyway,” says Cousin in a conciliatory voice. “Just look: I’ll show you something.”

  Cousin pumps and pumps his penis and it becomes all red and I think he will tear himself, and I say, “Stop it! You’ll bleed,” but he pumps and pumps and I begin to cry.

  Cousin, too, is close to crying. He mopes around for the rest of the afternoon with his fly looking stuffed. I haven’t been able to keep my eyes off flies since, intrigued by the fleshy machinery.

  Hari has adapted his name to his new faith: he wants us to call him Himat Ali. He has also changed his dhoti for the substantial gathers of the drawstring shalwar.

  I spend the night after my birthday at Godmother’s. Late in the evening her room resembles the barracks dormitory we peep into from the servants’ quarters roof. Five cots are laid out at all angles and there is hardly any space to walk.

  I lie on my cot, between Godmother and Dr. Manek Mody. Oldhusband is already snoring gently from the direction of our feet. Only the kitchen light is on and Slavesister is softly laying out the cups and saucers for the morning’s tea.

  “Hurry up and go to sleep, Lenny,” says Dr. Mody, so gleefully that I become suspicious and ask, “Why?”

  “Because I want to pounce on your Roda Aunty and eat her up. I’m hungry.”

  There he goes again.

  Godmother is silent. I reach out my hand and tap the wooden frame of her charpoy in the dark and she holds my hand tight.

  Dr. Mody makes a “slurp-slurp” sound and rubs his hands together in the dark.

  “Don’t be silly. You can’t eat people,” I say.

  “Go to sleep, can’t you?” he says, ignoring my comment. “Now, where do I start? ... Roast leg of Aunty or barbecued ribs? Of course! I’ll make a nice jelly from her trotters! Seasoned with cinnamon and orange juice—slurp-slurp. Just like Imam Din’s jelly.”

  Imam Din makes a delicious jelly—but out of sheep’s trotters.

  Dr. Mody’s cot creaks as he sits up, and I see his pajama-suited silhouette and bald head shining menacingly in the faint light from the kitchen. I spring out of bed and wrap my limbs about Godmother. She lies within my small arms and legs like a trusting and tremulous whale in her white garments. “If you touch her, I will kill you!” I scream. “I have a double-barreled gun!”

  “I think I will start with crumbed chops à la Roda,” says the doctor undeterred.

  The light is blocked briefly as Slavesister comes through the door, carefully balancing a saucer of hot tea for Godmother. She notices the seated doctor and asks, “Can I get you a nightcap?”

  “Yes, please. I’d love a hot cup of blood à la Roda: with salt and pepper.”

  I have a brilliant idea. “You can have Mini Aunty. She is fatter.”

  “Thank you very much!” says Mini Aunty.

  “I don’t want Mini. I’m in the mood for a tough old thing I can chew on.”

  “You’re a ghoul!” I screech sternly.

  “Oh, no. I’m only a vampire.”

  “Now, now. No more of that,” intervenes Slavesister. “Someone will have nightmares ... And then someone might wet her bed.”

  “Someone will not wet her bed!” I say firmly, using the tone Godmother uses to squash her.

  “Never mind your cheek. Get back to your charpoy. You should be fast asleep,” says Slavesister, completely unabashed, and patiently holding out Godmother’s saucer of hot tea.

  “Chi, chi, chi! She wets her bed?” says Dr. Mody, holding his nose. “Chi, chi, chi! Don’t sleep next to me.”

  “She does not wet the bed,” says Godmother, rising gallantly to the occasion—and to take her saucer of tea.

  “You wouldn’t know. You don’t wash the sheets,” says Slavesister recklessly. She’s probably counting on the inch Godmother allowed her when, bemused by the events of that historic day, she let Slavesister get away with insubordination on my birthday. But her lucky break has gone
the way of all such breaks and Godmother, rearing up on her pillows, retaliates: “Don’t think I’ve not been observing your tongue of late! If you’re not careful, I’ll snip it off! Then you’ll probably learn not to be rude in front of guests. I hate to think what Manek will tell our middle sister about your behavior before your elders!”

  “Really, Rodabai! How long will you treat me like a child?”

  “Till you grow up! God knows, you’ve grown older and fatter—but not up! This child here has more sense than you. Now stop eating our heads. Say your prayers and go to sleep.”

  Slavesister retreats to the kitchen and commences mumbling.

  Dr. Manek Mody represses his cannibalistic prowling and lies down quietly.

  It’s lovely to have someone fight your battles for you. Specially when you’re little. I adore Godmother. I latch on to her tighter, and kiss her rough khaddar nightgown. The pantry light goes out. Slavesister gropes her way to her sagging charpoy and continues her mumbles in the vicinity of our heads.

  “Um! Um!” warns Godmother.

  The mumbles stop.

  I know Dr. Mody is only teasing. After all, I’m eight!

  When will they stop treating me like a baby? And I’m fed up of being called Lenny baby, Lenny baby, Lenny baby ...

  When Godmother comes out of her bath the next morning, clattering into the kitchen on wooden thongs, her dolphin shape wrapped in only her sari, one shoulder bare, hair dripping—all dewy and fresh—she looks like a dainty young thing. As if the water has whittled away her age.

  By the time Slavesister emerges from her bath, looking like melting tallow and oozing moisture from powdered pores, Godmother has put on her bodice and blouse and velvet slippers and pumped alive the hissing Primus stove. She appears accepting of life. Conscious of her irrepressibly youthful spirit—raring to go.

  “What took you so long in the bath?” she says, getting the day off to a flying start. “You know Manek has to go out early. You know there’s so much to be done—the boys are coming in the evening—and you retire to splash from the bucket like Cleopatra!”